Interview

Each chapter here begins with a short section addressed directly to Brother Hamid and is followed by passages recounting the memories and thoughts that the letter brings to mind. The passages are beautifully crafted, lyrical, and sad. When he speaks about his torture in detail, his story is also deeply disturbing. For the lay reader unfamiliar with the details of Iran’s complex political history, however, Asadi’s story is ultimately confusing and inaccessible

Torture” slips readily off the newscaster’s tongue so that the reality of what it means for the victim is lost.

In his case this took the form of six years of physical and mental torment, humiliation and self-abasement in the ayatollahs’ prisons.

In a series of open letters to his personal torturer, Brother Hamid, later an Iranian ambassador, Asadi turns what could have been a litany of horrors into a philosophical analysis of his life-changing experiences

“A harrowing memoir of imprisonment and torture under the Islamic Republic of Iran… With moving stories about fellow prisoners, biting commentary on the religious dictates imposed by his jailers and meditations on the soul-destroying effect of false confessions and the special cruelty of his ideological, authoritarian interrogators, Asadi s simple prose attracts even as the facts he reports repel… A horrifying glimpse of the decades-long nightmare still afflicting the people of Iran

“Iranian journalist Asadi offers a searing and unforgettable account of the six years he spent in prison after being arrested in 1981 in the aftermath of the Islamic revolution. Asadi is a gifted storyteller… his ability to convey the toll of torture and imprisonment is undiminished. And the choice of the epistolary narrative device is a felicitous one: it’s as if the reader has found these letters in a shoebox or a locked drawer, making for harrowing and unique reading.”

Clive Stafford Smith

Director of Reprieve and author ofBad Me

A terrifying and deeply moving account of a man and a country still brutalized by the politics of fear.

Philippe Sands

author ofTorture Team

This remarkable, humane story of abuse and survival across Iranian regimes – told by Ayatollah Khamenei’s former cellmate – deserves a global audience, to understand the meaning of cruelty and the reality of modern, tragic, brutal Iran.”

Michael Henderson

author ofNo Enemy to Conquer: Forgiveness in an Unforgiving World

A scathing indictment of torture and a testament to survival against all odds. It is the revenge of truth and a past revealed but not yet healed